A Liberal finally gets it!!!

It's a funny thing how history shapes politics. Canada is such a huge country that the experience of someone in BC or Alberta is totally disconnected from the experience of Ontario or Newfoundland. My dad tells me how his family, a prominent family in the coastal pulp and paper industry in the early to mid 20th century, were very strong Liberal supporters. And he tells me how Trudeau changed that. We have known the utter disdain of Eastern Canadian politicians, the bigoted slurs towards Western rednecks, and the corruption and greed in both the Liberal and Progressive Conservative. Where we voted PC in '88 we just couldn't stomach the corruption of Mulroney and his coterie, nor his pandering to Quebec interests despite a strong Western base of MPs. We tossed him. The Liberals have never seemed to understand that the death of the PCs wasn't brought on by Reform, and it wasn't necessarily policy based, it was mostly a reaction to the rot, the pork barrel, the patronage, and the disdain with which Eastern politicians treated the grass roots in the West. We rebuilt a party from the bottom up because of that. That's why I am still proud to support the new Conservative Party.

It looks like the Liberals may finally get it. At least one has:

"The problem is, we rushed into a leadership race after the election defeat without ever really acknowledging the deep rot that has set into the Liberal Party, let alone doing anything to fix it. We created this rot, this sickness through years of Chretien/Martin civil war, preceded by years of Turner/Chretien civil war, going back who knows how many generations. A rot worsened by years of majority government with noses bellied-up to the trough, by self-important organizers that put winning and position before policy and what's right, by a deep sense of entitlement, by a bloated party machine dependent on big corporate donations."

Sure, he's not espousing Conservative policy and that's fine with me, I think we need policy choice. We certainly need an alternative to the Conservatives that is principled and clean. As I have often mused, I could support a clean Liberal Party under someone like Ignatieff or Manley. I'm not an ideological conservative so much as I want to vote for someone who does what they say they will do and won't line their own pockets while doing it. Maybe the Liberal Party will reform now that guys like Jeff have their blinders off.